Whether you believe that the vulgar comments and characterizations directed toward Passionate Users blogger Kathy Sierra represent a genuine death threat or are just another internet blogger feud gone beyond the limits of good taste and human decency, the incident reveals once more that the web can sometimes be a brutal and uncivilized place. With so many users and so much anonymity, it is inevitable that some webizens-hopefully, a very small percentage-will be true sociopaths and predators. Most are decent enough people, I suspect, who say things in blog posts and comments they would never say in a face-to-face situation simply because they can do so with impunity. It's good, clean, All-American fun to tell loudmouths like Michelle Malkin or Daily Kos to go fuck themselves. They have learned to expect it and know how to deal with it.Â

Kathy Sierra doesn't. While relatively mild compared to the daily flow of vitriol on the big political sites like RedState and Little Green Footballs, the attack on Sierra is unusually harsh for a non-political blog. That raises the question why?

Here's my theory.  Kathy Sierra is one of the most successful of the new generation of "careerist" bloggers who use the web to make a name for themselves and then leverage their new-found fame into books, speaking engagements and lucrative consulting engagements.  In so doing, she has challenged much of received wisdom of the early "kings" of the internet. The Cluetrainers and The Wellers seem particularly offended that she doesn't worship at the altar of information technology from which all goodness flows. Â

Cluetrain co-author Christopher Locke, aka RageBoy, seems to have made badmouthing Sierra a particular priority although he denies much complicity in the new round of charges. The irony, of course, is that Locke is as desperate for attention as Sierra.     Â

So, basically, what we have here is a case of an upstart elbowing her way to the corporate trough and swag bar while dissing her elders on the way. The crudeness of the attacks makes it inevitable that Sierra will emerge as the winner.  If Locke is as smart as he seems to think he is, he would come up with genuine arguments to rebut Sierra's rather trivial and obvious pablum and not resort to juvenile and offensive taunts.

What bothers me most about this is that politicians will seize upon the incident as proof that the web is "out of control" and needs regulation. The best thing that could happen now is that everybody simply shut the fuck up.